Tuesday, September 30, 2014

As
though refusing to admit that President Bush could have out-done him when it
comes to the waging of a series of terroristic wars abroad in the service of
phantom “national security” goals, President Obama has launched his version of a war in Iraq—and Syria.To be sure, the Islamic State, the target of
the U.S. military, is a brutal and destabilizing force in the Middle East, and
the horrified global reaction to its onslaught on existing states and
particularly minorities within those states speaks in part to the fact that we
don’t have good models for how to contend with non-state actors behaving in
this dangerous fashion.

But
if we are in search of a rational response to ISIS that is likely to prove
productive, I think that we can rest assured that the President’s bombing
campaign and arming of Syrian “rebels” is probably going to be inadequate.

Middle
Eastern leaders cut from a variety of cloths seem comparatively unified in
their fear of ISIS at the moment—although some of that fear might be posturing,
in the knowledge that it distracts from their own butchery, as in the case of
Assad, in Syria, or the Israeli government—and we can hope that many of their
citizens and subjects feel similar loathing.

But
the fact remains that U.S. bombing campaigns, never quite as clean and precise
as our rogue security services would have us believe, have a way of serving the
cause of their targets in the long term even if their violence might cause
momentary dismay.An attack by
outsiders—particularly when those outsiders have a history of launching brutal
wars of aggression—has a way of rallying disparate elements of any
society.

And
an attack by Obama’s patchwork coalition lacks the imprimatur associated with a
proper police or military action undertaken with more global consensus under
the aegis of the United Nations.That
such a consensus is so difficult to secure is in itself, of course, a testament
to the devotion with which the U.S, the USSR, China, Britain, and France work
to sabotage the legitimacy and logistical capabilities of the United Nations,
by way of reserving power to themselves.

But
let’s think about this coalition that the President has assembled.It includes Britain, the former colonial
power in Iraq, and our key ally in our bloody imperial misadventures.Several other European countries are
involved, and Australia and Canada are preparing to participate.

But
the Obama administration has been particularly concerned to trumpet the
participation of allies variously described as “Arab” or “Muslim” by way of
showing that we’re all in it together to defeat ISIS.These include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the
United Arab Emirates.

Call
me a cynic, but to me this coalition represents part of the problem.These are not nice governments.They are not democracies.They are not states that rule with the
consent or participation of their people.On the contrary, they are regimes that have worked hard to undermine the
Arab Spring and other manifestations of democratic feeling in the Middle
East.Their rule, and our complicity in
it, helped to spawn Al Qaeda and its ilk, the actions of which are given
legitimacy by their excoriations of the machinations of these monarchies.

It
is no coincidence that Al Qaeda and ISIS alike emphasise their charity and
concern for the people of the regimes they attack.This is designed to position them, however
wrongly in most eyes, as a counter to the irresponsible, bloated, monarchic
police states against which they contend.

The
military forces of these despots might be of use in the short term when it
comes to halting ISIS.But my fear is
that in the long term what looks too much like an imperial war involving all
the wrong actors will serve to buoy, if not ISIS, then whatever nihilistic,
fundamentalist movement inevitably replaces it when the political, social, and
economic grievances of people in the region go unanswered by the “authorities”.

As
a nation we clearly have a problem of perspective and imagination when our
reaction to any threat is to launch the drones and bombs.The actions of ISIS might be reprehensible,
but their existence demands explanation and suggests that there are factors
behind their emergence that will not be answered by any number of missiles
launched by the U.S. and its authoritarian allies.And there are people living in countries who
have been attacked by the United States who will wonder why ISIS’ rampage falls
into one category, when the extrajudicial killings of the Obama administration,
or the murderous war of “Shock and Awe” waged by the Bush administration fall
into another.

Our
response to this latest threat to peace in our world should cause us to take a
long, hard look at our “friends”, and also at our own significant role in the
violence and destabilization that spawned ISIS.

I have my thoughts
about CCCs offering BAs, but I was most interested in an aside in the story
about Brown's veto of legislation which "would have required CSU to share
performance data from online courses with its faculty academic
senate". Brown has been no friend of
open government, and online courses—which as a rule have abysmal retention
rates, sometimes in the single digits—are a pet project of his because of their
potential for cost-cutting (he's not so concerned about their potential for
short-changing, it seems).

Faculty members are the
people offering these courses. They are
the people charged with ensuring that students get a good education. And the Faculty Senate is their representative
body, which should have the tools to assess the work of its members and the
policies of the University, the largest system in the country.

The Bee reported Brown as saying, “I am
aware of the deep concerns that the sponsor of the bill expressed regarding
online courses. These courses, however,
could play an important role in helping to reduce the bottleneck that too often
prevents students from graduating on time.
This is one of the reasons I believe that we should not unduly limit the
introduction of online courses in the Cal State system”.

On its face, that is an
extraordinary statement.

It is an admission of
the fact that there is something troubling in the data that legislators believe
faculty representatives should be allowed to see, but which the Governor wishes
to hide from them.

It is an admission that
if that data were released, the Governor fears that it would limit the
introduction of online courses at CSU.

And it is an admission
that, building on the previous two, Governor Brown is not really concerned with
the quality of students’ education, but rather with pushing them through the
system.

There are other barriers
to students’ abilities to get through university in a timely fashion.

Obscenely high tuition—which
means the virtual privatization of California’s universities—forces students to
take loans or else work long hours, decreasing the time they can devote to
their studies.

Jerry Brown has created
the conditions that generate these tuition increases, recently equating
increased public funding for UC with a “bailout”. It’s probably news to California’s
debt-burdened students that they’re in the same camp with Wall Street
plutocrats!

By refusing to fund CSU
and UC properly, Brown has allowed the campuses to re-cast themselves as
corporate entities, providing services to students who can afford them under
the guidance of over-paid and under-performing administrators (at least based
on the ability of those administrators to do good for their students and the
state).

On the subject of
property tax, not only was Brown’s laziness in the 1970s responsible for Prop
13 (which removed discretion when it comes to the use of property taxes as a
stabilizing revenue stream and instituted the undemocratic supermajority rules,
of which his current austerity drive is an inevitable consequence); he has
refused to use his third term to address the inequities in a property tax
structure which treats corporate property owners and homeowners the same way.

The charge-sheet
against Governor Jerry Brown is a lengthy one.
His approach to higher education is based on unaccountability, on forcing
students through the system without heed for the quality of the education they
receive, and on the reduction of public funding for public institutions so that
he can run on what sounds very much like a right-wing platform.

California’s
universities, their students, and their faculty deserve far better. And so does the state, the future of which
depends on its ability to re-tool its economy and public sphere to address the
inequality which has come to define too many Californians’ lives.

Monday, September 29, 2014

Last
Thursday in European History Since 1648 at UNLV we tackled the French Revolution.If you’re thinking that zipping through
arguably one of the most important events of the last four hundred years—an
event many historians use to mark the beginning of “modern” history—in just over an hour sounds absurd,
you’re correct!

And
to add to the absurdity, the first part of class was spent on an exercise
getting students to think about how to combine primary and secondary sources
with an aim to asking good historical questions of an appropriate scale for a
research project they might do for a class like ours.Each of six groups of students was given a
different source, along with the “master list” of all six sources.They had to determine whether their source
was “primary” or “secondary”, what its “takeaway” was, how it fit with the
other six sources, what research questions they could ask based on this
grouping of sources, and what kind of additional information or source material
they would need to be successful in their research.

We
reconvened as a class and discussed their ideas.Only time will tell if it was worth
sacrificing some of the little time we had to deal with the French Revolution,
but I enjoyed hearing students thoughts develop as they scrutinized the
sources.

Being
even more pressed for time than before, we talked our way through the French
Revolution in lieu of lecture, using the five short texts the students had
read.These allowed us to discuss the
organization of French society and politics before the Revolution, identify key
grievances of revolutionaries, discuss the rhetoric those revolutionaries
deployed as they took power (and compare and contrast it to the language of the
U.S. constitution), and discuss the limitations of the Revolution.

Students
seemed most interested in material from Olympe de Gouges, a feminist critic of
a “Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen” which left women out; and
Maximilien Robespierre, whose discussion of “terror” and “virtue” marked a turning
point of the Revolution.This sparked an
interesting discussion about the balance between “liberty” and “order” which
was just getting going when the clock called time on class.

Hopefully
we’ll be able to return to the discussion in the coming days and weeks.

It
illustrates how the reintroduction of these predators has transformed prey
populations, increased the diversity of other species, “restored” denuded
habitats and, as the title suggests, changed the course of a river.

The
role of wolves in shaping the Yellowstone ecosystem is an old one that has been
well-documented for the last hundred odd years.Alston Chase has a most interesting book titled Playing God in Yellowstone: the Destruction of America’s First National
Park that walks readers through an earlier episode of management folly, wherein
ill-informed park managers and hunters destroyed the park’s predators with an
aim to increasing the elk population.

The
result was a fundamentally-altered habitat that led to cataclysmic die-offs of
elk well beyond anything wolves could have ever caused.In contrast to this earlier disaster, the
reintroduction of wolves in the last two decades—despite the controversy they
inevitably spark amongst their human neighbors—has so far been to all
appearances a boon for the park ecosystem.

A
friend who watched the video commented, how nice it would be if the benefits of
interconnectedness that were demonstrated in the natural world could be applied
to our understandings of human societies.Because poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, and corrosion of
our institutions and politics are not problems which remain isolated.

Eventually,
in one way or another, no one will be free from their effects, and
understanding that we are members of connected communities rather than disaffected
individuals could go a long way toward curing our ills.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

In 2010, California gubernatorial candidate Jerry
Brown missed an opportunity. Brown could
have run on a platform of political reform, with a promise to address
California’s dangerous democratic deficit.
Or he could have run while sponsoring a series of reform-minded
initiatives, designed to create a situation in which he could have got his
first term off to a productive start.
Or, he could have run on an idealistic progressive platform designed to
create electoral coat-tails for other Democrats with an eye toward capturing
supermajorities in the Senate and Assembly.

Instead, Brown ran on a very simple, very stupid
pledge. He would not, he pledged, ever
attempt to raise taxes without the approval of voters. He was prepared, in other words, to abandon his
role as governor, and ask legislators to give up all of their discretion, and
operate on a two-year budget cycle subject not to the structured deliberations
of elected representatives or an integrated direct democracy process designed
to function alongside existing institutions.
No, Brown’s pledge means that California operates on two-year cycles
that are governed according to who can muster up the most corporate dollars for
ad-buys and propaganda.

Like the economic fundamentalists of the Republican
Party who governed the state from the minority (thanks to undemocratic
supermajority requirements imposed by Proposition 13, passed under Brown’s
watch in 1978) having pledged away the use of their grey cells to Howard
Jarvis, Brown dispensed with the discretion associated with good
policymaking. In a conventional
political system, good economic times could lead to higher taxes to invest in
public services. In difficult times, a
measure of redistribution might be necessary.
In light of demographic stabilization, tax cuts might be in order. But Brown’s pledge-based ballot-box budgeting
does away with this discretion.

The result was two years of the worst austerity this
state has seen during which Brown, eager to prove his “fiscal responsibility”, pillaged
our public services for “savings” which came at a tremendous social and
economic cost to the working class, students, children, the elderly, the sick,
the homeless, and those with no voice in our society.

Relying on an initiative to pass Prop 30, an
inadequate band-aid, set a dangerous precedent.
It sent the message that it was good politics—even if bad policy, and
horrifically immoral—for politicians to abdicate responsibility and pass the
buck to a fickle public which exercises its democratic rights in a piecemeal
fashion which puts the initiative system structurally at odds with our representative
system.

Now Brown is running for Governor again, and
the Sacramento Bee reported that “Brown
declined to say Friday if he will maintain the pledge he made in 2010 not to
raise taxes without a public vote” in his fourth term. Brown’s
response, which focused on the water bond and rainy day fund initiatives he is
pushing suggested that additional revenue for California’s still-beleaguered
public sphere was not a priority. Indeed,
the idea of a mandated rainy day fund operates on the misguided premise that
even in hard times like these, when schools and universities have a long way to
go before they recover, it makes sense to redirect any surplus funds to a
rainy-day fund rather than to people who are struggling amidst an on-going
social and economic downpour.

While Brown’s refusal to commit himself to another
silly, debilitating pledge will undoubtedly frustrate some of his critics, his
refusal to address California’s democratic deficit—and the damage that such
pledges do to the state given the structural inadequacies of its institutions—is
even more frustrating.

Commentators have praised Brown’s accomplishments,
ignoring his two-year punitive assault on the public sphere, which has now been
followed by two years of neglect or unhelpful devolution. But they also ignore the fact that those
accomplishments Brown has managed to wring out of our system are due to a
unique set of circumstances which are unlikely to be replicated with any future
governor, all but ensuring that in a post-Brown California we will return to an
even greater state of gridlock absent any efforts at political reform.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

A more human representation of Baartman than the caricatures which defined her image in the 19th century.

Our lecture last Thursday in European History Since 1648 at UNLV
explored the Enlightenment as it had long been assessed by historians and its
own philosophes: as associated with reason, with rational
government, with the accumulation of knowledge, with the ordering of that
knowledge, and with ideas of liberty of thought and action.

Today we explored some of the harsher realities of the
Enlightenment: the limits of its applicability and the violence that its desire
for order and hierarchy could inflict on human beings when its claims about
universality passed them over.

We watched Zola Maseko’s film, The Life and Times of Sara Baartman.The eponymous historical figure was a young
Khoisan woman abducted in South Africa and transported to London, where she was
exhibited as a “freak” to European audiences, gaining renown as the “Hottentot
Venus”, a not-quite-human creature in the eyes of onlookers.

Baartman eventually arrived in Paris where she was the subject
of prurient “scientific” examination.Even in death her tormentors did not leave her in peace: her body was
dismembered and her genitalia—part of what Enlightened Europeans believed
defined her inhumanity—and skeleton were displayed in the Musee de l’Homme.

The film is sobering, but at its conclusion the class had a
thoughtful conversation about how features of the Enlightenment permitted or
even encouraged the demarcation of difference and the dehumanization that Sarah
Baartman’s experience illustrates so tragically.Students also drew some parallels with some
of the ways in which people are objectified or enslaved today, along both
gendered and racial lines.

On Thursday we will begin exploring the first of two revolutions
that shook Europe’s political and ideological foundations during the
late-eighteenth century.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.